US College Radio in the 1960s: Music, Anticapitalism, and Antiracism

This paper will examine the links between anticapitalism and antiracism in United States college music radio of the late 1960s, using radio station WFMU as the main example. Founded in 1958 as a station of Lutheran Upsala College, in East Orange, New Jersey, WFMU first rose to national prominence in 1968-1969 as the only listener-supported 24-hour “freeform” college station, where DJs mixed multiple music genres and spoken word recordings. It drew inspiration from the leftist nonprofit New York Pacifica station WBAI and its freeform pioneers Bob Fass, Steve Post, and Larry Josephson. It built mutual aid relationships with local and national music scenes: it became a platform for Detroit proto-punk bands like MC5 and the Stooges and organized fundraising benefits where celebrated New York bands such as the Fugs played for free.

The paper will analyze the ways the station’s anticapitalist sensibility intersected with militant antiracist politics. WFMU’s DJs marched for civil rights, opposed the war in Vietnam, and participated in the protests at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. They played free jazz by Archie Shepp and Malcom X speaking on “bullets and ballots.” College radio’s civil rights activism had its limitations. When the predominantly black working-class neighborhood around Upsala College exploded in April-May 1969, WFMU DJs, both white and black, joined an on-campus black power struggle. As a result, the university administration forced two DJs off the air; by August 1969, the entire freeform crew quit en masse in protest. In the long term, however, WFMU provided a proof-of-concept for noncommercial college broadcasting based on listener donations and cooperation with local music scenes, a model that would dominate college radio from the 1970s into the 1990s.